Letters

A college student, Zoe, writes about how she discovered the ideas of socialism and what they mean to her.

I stumbled upon Socialism by accident last year—it was my freshman year in college, and I signed up for several classes, two of them being Sociology and Media Analysis.

These classes changed my life.

My Sociology class was taught by a professor who is a full-fledged communist. Our first day in class he stood in front of two hundred students, all (like myself at the time) brainwashed with Corporate Ideology, all going to school to get a Diploma and get a "REAL JOB", all cutthoat competitive with one another because the person sitting besides you was out to get your job, and told us that "you are in college to receive an EDUCATION, not a degree...and with the knowledge attained in school, you will have a better understanding of yourselves and your position in life, so that when you leave school and get jobs and some Fascist Pig of an employer gives you an underpaid job and expects you to work like a dog for no benefits and be enthusiastic about it, you can tell him to go to hell and have a clean conscious about it."

WOAH. He told us this, and a lot more, for the next hour. About fifty students stood up and walked out of the class. I sat there with my jaw on my lap.

In the class I learned about the fleecing of the American People. I learned that ten percent of the population controls ninty percent of everything. I learned that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing every year, and that cooperations are poisoning the land on which we live and telling the average citizen that it’s our fault. I learned that in other parts of the world, workers don’t slave away at jobs 55 hours a week. That a lunch break is some developed nations is actually a full hour. That work doesn’t have to steal your entire life in other countries. I learned that Americans never VOTED on HMOs and MediCAL. I learned that Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, cleared 500 MILLION dollars last year....and that Disney still downsized thousands of workers. I learned that two-thirds of the minimum-wage workers in this country are full-grown adults trying to feed their famlies. I learned that companies are hiring more and more part-time employees so that they can avoid paying benifits; therefore workers are having to take on two jobs.

In Media Analysis I learned that virtually all the news that the public is presented with has been whitewashed, edited, etc; because the media is controlled by Corporations. I learned that Corporations have used the media to push Corporate Ideology onto us...to brainwash us...telling us that rabid competition is totally natural. Telling us that poor people are poor because they are inferior, or lazy. Telling us that this is AMERICA, and we can have it all if we only work hard enough for it, even though I know many youth with college degrees who are still working at menial office jobs or at the video store...paying off their student loans. The media tells the middle class that the working class is an enemy, when the middle and working classes are brothers. The media tells us that happiness can be obtained through the acquiring of material goods, and that ANYONE can become a millionaire. That you shouldn’t depend on anyone but yourself—always look out for number one, and forget about your brother toiling besides you.

Well BULLSHIT.

Isn’t that mean, isn’t that inhuman? I don’t think that I’m some sappy

bleeding heart because I don’t want to step on and betray my own people to get ahead. America is the richest country in the world, so why aren’t the people benefiting in some way? Why are we all still working outrageous hours for $5.15/hour? I don’t want to work fifty hours a week and only get two weeks of vacation a year. There’s more to life than that, isn’t there? Why should I do that, when some fatass CEO gets paid hundreds of times more than I do for doing NOTHING? I know so many workers and students who put in forty hours a week, work their fingers to the bone, and still don’t break the poverty line every year. That isn’t right, and that isn’t their faults. It’s CAPITALISM’s fault. I am a self-sufficient person, and I believe in working for what I get, and I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming something else...but I am.

Socialism is a better way, I think.

So anyway, now that I’ve ranted and raved, all that I’m saying is that if I feel this way, surely other students will also. Eventually people are going to get sick of being exploited. I only hope that it’s in my lifetime.

Please keep up the good work at YFIS, whoever reads this....I do enjoy your site, and I’m grateful for the hope that you’ve given me. I’m tuning friends onto this site also.